“Losing momentum is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a startup.”

Lately it’s been a no-brainer (though still really nice to log our progress publicly) but there was a period when we were scraping the bottom of the barrel for UVIs in order to stay on the yellow brick road.
It’s clear they wouldn’t have happened without that kick in the pants and losing momentum like that is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a startup.
In fact, we were inspired to make our UVI commitment by Paul Graham’s essay “How Not to Die” in which he suggests that if you could just fully commit yourself to not giving up, your chances of success would be 90%. “I’m not kidding,” he adds.

We’ll take those odds. So we’re hereby renewing that contract and making some others public as well…

New dog food! Now with more fiber for regularity!

Here’s how we’re bettering Beeminder.
If we go off track on any of the following graphs, the first user to claim the prize in the comments of this blog post, will get the spoils. [1]

We hope you like our blog, because you’re getting more of it.
We think it keeps us honest, or at least it keeps us talking.
Hopefully our commitment to publish (and our sparkling wit and literary genius) will keep you reading.

D/meta and B/meta are our graphs of how much time each of us spend building Beeminder.
We get a ton of value out of beeminding our Beeminder building, and now we’re getting even more(less) value out of it by promising the spoils to you (instead of to ourselves).
We had an incentive problem there that this solves neatly.

UPDATE 2015: The new place for calling the Beeminder founders out when they derail on their meta goals
is in the Beeminder forum.

Footnotes

[1] Fine print: The first person to leave a comment here outing us as officially off the yellow brick road, gets the money.
If there’s a red dot below the road that means we have until midnight eastern that night to reach the bottom edge or we cough it up.
The usual Beeminder rules apply: any changes are allowed as long as they are outside the Akrasia Horizon of one week.
The money shown as “pledged” is the amount you’ll win.
This varies among the above graphs.

UPDATE 2012:
After a ridiculous close call, we’re updating the fine print!
We were in Portland on an emergency UVI day, did the UVI, then had to run off to various Important Things all day.
We got back around 9pm, which OMG! is midnight eastern time!
And we hadn’t yet tweeted the UVI!
So there were some number of minutes when you totally could’ve called us out on that $1000.
(And, for the record, we were absolutely ready to pay it if you had.)
We like having stricter rules for these dog food contracts, but from now on let’s keep it more in line with the rules you all are subject to:
you have to wait for the actual skull and crossbones on the graph to claim the money.
And we have till midnight local time, wherever we happen to be, to actually get the work done.
It’s too easy to forget about time zone differences otherwise.

UPDATE 2013:
You don’t have to wait for skull and crossbones anymore, since those are going away anyway.
Claiming the bounty at midnight is fine.

Ridiculously, my heart actually raced a little when I saw your first comment! As you can see from our revenue graphs, we’re not quite to the point where $1000 is pocket change. In fact, we’re just now about to cross $1000 as the total amount pledged on Beeminder. Not including from ourselves, of course. And not counting things like this from our private beta period: http://blog.beeminder.com/gym

I guess we’re too shy to link to them here but if you click around you can find them. As you’ll see (if you’re sufficiently curious) it’s just a trickle, but the fact that it seems to be a *steady* trickle has us hopeful that it’s just a matter of time before we turn it into a stream.

Per some famous advice from Paul Buchheit, we’re focusing first on making a small number of users insanely happy.

Good catch! You probably noticed I was cutting it really close for a bit there. Only 17 minutes would have put me on the road last night, but I literally couldn’t keep my eyes open to do it. You earned my $5!

I’m not sure what timezone https://www.beeminder.com/mo/meta is in. I expected NYC time, which means by my clock Melanie is off the road. However if Melanie is in another timezone, or I’m reading the graph correctly, then there might be a few hours left. :)

Hmm, the fine print does say NYC time, though Melanie’s time zone is California (pacific), which would give her till 3am eastern.

Wait, as I was typing that she showed up online and started responding to customer emails. :)

I’m not sure what’s most fair given the fine print there. If anyone wants to chime in with an opinion, we’ll definitely listen.

My inclination is to go with her own time zone and maybe even update the fine print such that the same rules apply to us as to Beeminder users: namely, we have at least till 3am in our own time zone to get the data entered. In other words, you wouldn’t be able to claim our money until there’s a skull and crossbones on the graph.

To keep it nailed down in the meantime though, let’s say this: the current fine print stands (you can claim the money at midnight NYC) except for Melanie, who has till midnight pacific.

That’s clearly what she thought the rule was and we have a policy of leniency in the case of legitimate confusion about the rules.

Sound good? Now let’s see if Melanie comes in under the wire in 90 minutes…

I guessed you could be related due to the similarity in the names. Further guessed probably your sister and because of which you could be guilted in to taking care of her – like coughing up the cash when she fails to live up to the commitments she makes. I have younger siblings.

I had actually been checking carefully that day to see if you were going to miss the deadline. I got busy with my own things, and when I went back to check twitter I realised there was a tiny window during which I could have called it, but figured that since you were back on the road, that window had passed.

This, boys and girls, is why you should program bots to do all the important things for you. :)

Thanks for paying such close attention! However, I have until the skull and crossbones actually appear, so I’m in the clear! I have until midnight pacific (I’m on west coast) to complete my time for today. Keep checking in case I fall asleep at the computer though, I *am* cutting it close. :-)

yeah, for anyone confused by this, note the update to the fine print. btw, the alluded to “day in Portland” and “Important Things all day” was when we came out to interview for Portland Seed Fund, which we just blogged about now that it’s official: http://blog.beeminder.com/beehive

We’re delighted that people are paying such close attention! We’re fine with the false alarms. In fact, if you check out the comments from a few months ago you’ll notice that there was a brief window when we would’ve paid up the $1000 if someone had posted a comment. I’d say at this point there’s less than a 1% chance that you’ll find us off the road at the stroke of midnight tonight. But 1% of $1000 might make it worth your while to make a habit of checking every night. :)

Oh, I see, it’s that you made yesterday’s in the nick of time, and are still under the wire for today. (the -1 thing is confusion. It seems “0” should be off the road and need to update by midnight; “-1” should mean you’re past that point. Or maybe that’s just me)

(I wasn’t sure if it was kosher for me to claim Melanie’s $10 but she’s about to reset and everyone else seems to have missed it. I figure it’s better for me to claim it than to give the impression that this offer has expired or anything.)

(Note also the $270 at stake on us publishing a new blog post by the end of the day today!)

@54492134f53b689ee024753b1939a275:disqus It’s actually just an “emergency day” today! We have till midnight tonight to get our UVI. When the skull and crossbones appear on the graph that means we’ve officially derailed. Delighted that people are keeping an eye on us!

Sorry, just seeing this, but I had forgotten to enter data last night after a non-stop day. I did 20 minutes in the morning and assumed I’d do more later, but never did and then forgot to enter it. I entered it this morning and was unfrozen.

Ok, duking it out with both Stefan and Melanie. :) I already paypal’d you last night, Stefan. And perhaps we’ll take Melanie off of this dogfood contract (she’s only at 2 hours/week now, which, as Paul Fenwick pointed out it in http://blog.beeminder.com/habits , makes it hard to get in the habit of staying on track!).

But in the meantime, what it says in the above blog post goes, and that’s cash money, not credits or anything!

crap! I just did 40 minutes of work, sincerely thinking today was my eep! day and then went to my graph to enter my data only to see skull and crossbones. WTH! I could have swore the text for emergency day came this morning, but I looked at my texts and it was yesterday. I really need more than one text on emergency days. It’s true that this is too infrequent for me right now for it to be a habit. I’m relying on notifications and even those are getting lost in my busy shuffle.

Ooh, this was a close call! But notice the updated fine print: the rule is midnight in the timezone we’re in, which is now pacific. It’s 9pm here and we just tweeted our emergency UVI for today. http://twitter.com/beemuvi

Actually this timezone thing means i won’t have to get up at 5am to comment so that is better.

I think it would be a good idea to split the money if multiple people comment within a minute of derailing. After all, i assume the idea is to get people to watch your progress not reward the fastest reflexes of button clicking.

It’s true! But note the most recent update after coughing up a total of $150 or so for Melanie: “We’re swapping out Melanie for Andy who will bump up his pledge as soon as we add a feature to do that!”

Hey Karlson! Not a mistake and we’re delighted that you’re watching closely but notice our last update where we swapped out Melanie for Andy. So Melanie coughed up $90 on this one (again!) but it’s no longer one of the graphs we pay out on here. Sorry for the confusion on that!

Ha, nice catch! But looking at the fine print (“you have to wait for the actual skull and crossbones on the graph to claim the money. And we have till midnight local time, wherever we happen to be, to actually get the work done.”) I think Bethany eked by here. The countdown did hit zero at midnight pacific, but she had done the work (barely) and it was just a matter of re-syncing her TagTime log to make it show up on the graph.

On the other hand, it’s going to be super touch-and-go again tonight so stay tuned! :)

You are indeed correct. Evidently my reading comprehension immediately after waking up isn’t so hot. Sadly, being 3 hours later means I can no longer use checking for the dog food money as a free un-snoozable alarm clock.

I missed your first question before: that $1000 contract predates our ingenius pledge schedule! :) If we cough that one up then we’ll go to the next official level ($2430) like everyone else. Well, “everyone”. One person has ever gone that high. But the point is, yes, we’re very into dog food! We don’t even give ourselves “employee discounts” on premium plans or anything. We use Beeminder the same way everyone else does.

We have a winner! $270 to Henrik! Let us know your preferred way to receive money. (Paypal is most convenient for us, as much as we dislike them.) We’re up to $810 at stake on the blog graph now. Exciting!

Red dot means it’s an emergency day. We have to get the work done by midnight (like tweeting the UVI at http://twitter.com/beemuvi !) but you have to wait till the skull and crossbones appear to claim the bounty. Stay tuned!

I’ll try to claim it in time, however there is one thing that I don’t understand, I’m new to the site and I’ve been reading through the posts and blogs devouring the interesting information and reflexions on this problem. I suffer this problem but I’ve never used any commitment machine on myself.

The thing I don’t understand:

“If we cough that one up then we’ll go to the next official level ($2430) like everyone else. Well, “everyone”. One person has ever gone that high. But the point is, yes, we’re very into dog food! We don’t even give ourselves “employee discounts” on premium plans or anything. We use Beeminder the same way everyone else does.”

Does everyone else have the option to rectify and go into the road after the skull appears? I thought that’s not the way it works, but then I am new and have not yet make any pledge.

What I meant was that waiting until midnight on the day it goes off is not a feature for every user, or is it? You should either implement it for everyone or stop using special rules. Of course I would never think you would for today, but think about it. The problem would be how to track it. A way to implement it that comes to my mind would be to be able to define the time it takes for the skull to come after you are in the red without the need to mess with local times, give yourself another 12-24h to get back on track.
If you need that last day impulse to finish things you should be counting on that the day before or implement it in the system.

Another thing I’ve found looking at your UVI graph is that readability becomes hard when the graph goes for long time, isn’t there a way to zoom the graph?

I’m not sure that I want to private myself of the freedom to overcome my flaws and accomplish what I want on my own free will. I don’t want to be chained. Lately I’ve been more aware of my problem and I have been improving, the tool is a good way to track progress anyways, could you recommend any similar tools to track progress without penalties attached? I know it is not what you are working towards, but I would only use something that privates me of freedom (to success or to fail on my own) as the last recourse.

Curiously enough, rather than helping me to get rid of the problem, using this would make it impossible to overcome it, since I would never be able to change my behavior, I would always be dependent on this to do anything. I mean, if you only need it in one facet of your life it is ok to use it to accomplish that one goal, but you will never evolve if you use it for everything.

Delighted you’re keeping an eye on our meta graphs! That’s not one of the ones we’re publicly beeminding though. In fact, we’re not really beeminding that at all (since it’s not a thing we have direct control over) and are rather just retrofitting a yellow brick road to see the trend.

Ooh, yikes! We did the UVI and tweeted it and then I forgot to actually update the bmndr.com/meta/uvi graph till now. So we might actually have to cough this up even though it’s a technicality (we’re purposefully holding ourselves to higher standards — for our users we always make sure you never pay up if it’s a technicality). So we’ll go with the precise intent of the fine print here. The only thing that may save us is how to interpret “you may claim the bounty at midnight”.

So Somervta is the first to claim it and gets it if it is in fact forfeited, but we did the work by midnight (including publicly tweeting) and entered the +1 on Beeminder in time to keep the graph from officially derailing. So, arguably, the money was not in fact forfeited. (Our minds can be changed here if that sounds weaselly!)

Clearly we need to hurry and add a Twitter integration for automatic Twitter minding to make this moot. (We actually can do that already via IFTTT.com but our UVI goal is still odometer style so it’s easier said than done.)

See reply above. Tentatively I’m thinking the right interpretation of the official rules is that we have to do the work by midnight, you can claim the money exactly at midnight, but the money isn’t paid unless it’s an official derailment, per the standard rules, which means we have a grace period till ~3am to get the data entered (if it’s a graph with manual data entry).

(I’m obviously biased, but this is my view)
On the one hand, this is definitely the kind of thing that would be fine if you emailed support under the category of ‘forgot data’ – I’ve done that myself several times.

On the other hand, this isn’t exactly a standard beeminder goal, and previously on this page when someone forgot to enter data, it’s counted, although that was back when the fine print was ‘if you see the skull, you can claim the money’.

However, the Twitter thing makes this line of reasoning suspect – you forgot to enter data, but you did still announce it.

I think you’ve been clear that you’re holding yourself to midnight in the past – and the graph wasn’t updated. This is a technicality, for sure, but if you’re holding yourselves to a better-than-best standard then I think you should pay.

It might also provide some incentive to add Twitter integration, which would also be a worth goad!

I don’t know if there’s weasel-room if we could prove that the first one was deployed in time but I think we clarified the fine print after the last close call: it has to actually get tweeted by midnight, which this was not!

meta/uvi had a red dot below the road and has not been updated as of 12AM EST, as in the first point of “Fine print.” (I love calling you guys on this for the money, but I hate calling you guys on this, since Beeminder has made it possible for me to track my efforts at quitting smoking by the end of the year. 29 days straight with 0 cigarettes and counting! [100+ days in the last year] ) (I’m user: “alie” here at beeminder)

Then get you coding! :) And I see how I could misread the fine print; I thought point three meant “claiming the bounty at midnight EST is fine, as in point one” not “we still have until midnight local time” or I wouldn’t have warned you, drat. :P

And I’m not sure if I can claim $90 on mo/goals/meta. It’s derailed, but because the raw data isn’t visible to others, I can’t quite tell if it’s been de-railed for a while. (Unless there’s a cool way to do that and I’ve missed it…)

Basically, this goal has never been on the pledge schedule since it predates the pledge schedule. It’s just $1000 per derailment. When we’re rich enough that $1000 is no longer *super* motivating then we’ll bump it up!

Argh, just had a TagTime malfunction on beeminder.com/b/meta and may have lost some data. Will sort it out by comparing to backups soon but in the meantime Danny added a retroactive break in my road to match what my road was showing before TagTime (specifically TagTime’s Beeminder sync, probably) screwed up. It may be that my TagTime data has been off for months and I should’ve derailed but this is the fairest fix we can think of now.

If the post isn’t live when the goal hits its deadline, the $810 is yours! I actually scheduled it to auto-post at t minus 5 minutes and our wordpress plugin to send the datapoint to beeminder is broken. Here’s the secret preview if you can’t wait to read it: http://blog.beeminder.com/fearofbees?secretpreview

Highly unusual for us to be this on top of things, ironically! :) And thanks so much for paying close attention! (It just now occurs to me how shady it looks since the goal is in fact no longer counting down in the red. So we won’t do that anymore. In fact, let me just undo that right now and either automate it properly or set an alarm and wake up in time to post it…) But for the record, the deadline was not in fact reached!

It was close and she snoozed the deadline (which is allowed, with 6 hours lead time!) but I don’t believe it ever derailed. There was also some question about internet connectivity — letting Beeminder know that she got the final bit of work done — since we were traveling but as far as we can see, it went through in time and everything.

Start Here

Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.

Akrasia

Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia